Thursday, January 12, 2006

Heart of admantium

Well, back to reality, of a sort, after all that heady heady comic book tripping:

My love let me spoil her a little yesterday morning. I always have to fight tooth and nail to get her to let me indulge her a bit, as she's just not used to it from anyone in her life previous to meeting me.

Yesterday I got up early with the two older kids (they have to roll out of bed at 5 am to catch a 6 am bus) and let SuperGirlfriend sleep an extra hour. I also did the morning chores around the house as she wasn't feeling all that great; unloading and reloading the dishwasher, packing a lunch for SuperAdorable Kid (and my own, which SuperGirlfriend usually spoils me by packing for me), taking the trash out, making the bed (the last of which are my designated morning chores, anyway).

No big deal. But SuperGirlfriend was raised in a household where everyone expected her to do all her own housework, plus as much of theirs as they could fob off on her, and she spent twenty years with a guy who resolutely refused to ever get up early with the kids no matter how much she might need it, and who made doing anything at all she asked him to do into a huge tit for tat bargaining session -- an "okay, if I do the dishes and make the bed for you today, what am I going to get out of it and how soon" negotiation.

I can't imagine trying to maintain a loving relationship that way; I've always felt that when you're running a favor tab with someone, keeping track of who owes who what and how soon the debts are due, well, by definition, that someone isn't your friend (much less, your domestic/romantic life partner). To my mind, one of the simplest definitions of real friendship is, well, you don't bother keeping score, you just trust the other person not to take advantage of you... and when you stop trusting them, well, you stop being friends with them.

Anyway, I did all that stuff, which wasn't a big deal, because SuperGirlfriend needed a little extra sleep, and SuperDependable Teen fried an egg for breakfast yesterday and the smell in the kitchen combined with SuperGirlfriend feeling a little nauseous would have made it very difficult for her to be out there making lunches. A no brainer; she's the love of my life and it makes me happy to make her happy. I'm sure you can all dig it.

But SHE thinks it's a big deal, because, you know, I'm the first person she's ever known who's been decent to her, I guess. So last night, when she came and picked me up, she had a little gift for me: the Jocasta Unique from the most recent Marvel HeroClix expansion, one of the last few Uniques from that set I want.

At 78 points, Jocasta is no game breaker. Still, with the newest WizKids designer apparently determined to deflate all the games recent wildly jacked up attack and defense statistics once again, her opening Attack Value of 10 with a damage of 3 makes her a solid hitter. From there she drops down to 9 for two clicks of Psychic Blast at a 2 damage, which isn't shabby. That and her opening two clicks of Impervious make her a nice little package for the points.

Not that her playability matters much to me; I just wanted her because she represents an interesting character from late 70s Avengers continuity, and she gives me someone to put over next to my various Ultrons.

This really leaves only the new Spider-Man fig as a Unique I really want from ARMOR WARS, although I wouldn't mind getting the new Magneto and Mystique, either.

SuperGirlfriend also delighted me with a box I've been impatiently waiting for since shortly after my birthday, containing my mailaway ARMOR WARS freebie, the Anthony Stark Unique. Upon opening it I was delighted all over again; although the WizKids site clearly depicts that the fig has no TA on its base, mine sports the Avengers TA, meaning I give up absolutely nothing by simply swapping the gold armored sculpt from ARMOR WARS' Iron Man Unique with this grey armored sculpt. This is lovely, as the Anthony Stark Unique has a significantly better dial than the Iron Man version, which is kind of ridiculous, since the golden armor represents at least a generation of improvements in the basic Stark battlesuit technology.

I'd planned to swap them out anyway, but had been sad at the thought that my gold armored Iron Man, who actually was in the Avengers, wouldn't have the Avengers TA. However, now he does! (It makes little sense for WizKids to have put the Avengers TA on the grey armored Iron Man, since IM only wore that armor in his origin story, before the Avengers ever formed. But in this case, their mistake is my enormous gain.)

Looking at the two different figs and dials, you almost have to think that WizKids intentionally designed it this way. The dial they gave us with the gold armor, available from booster packs, has generally lower stats and a much more limited power array than the dial on the supposedly more primitive grey armored mailaway. About the only way to make things work consistently with actual comic book continuity is to do exactly what I have done, and switch figures. Perhaps the new game designer is more subtle than I thought.

In addition to all this, SuperGirlfriend also printed off several sheets of Green Lantern Power Battery and Mr. Terrific's T-sphere pogs (see one of my entries down below) so the SuperKids and I will have those if we want to use them in any future games. The T-Spheres I expect to be very useful when playing Mr. Terrific from now on, but the Power Batteries are also cool, being set up as they are to be able to be hidden on Hindering Terrain, and to provide the Support power when necessary, if only to Green Lanterns. (They have a movement value of 0, so they have to be picked up and carried around, or you have to go to them.)